


all my charms and all my accidents

by ShowMeAHero



Series: as the ghost begins to bleed [15]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Babies, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Family, Fix-It, Fluff, Humor, Kid Fic, M/M, Marriage, Mike Denbrough, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Necromancy, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Rituals, Spells & Enchantments, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Witchcraft, curly-haired eddie kaspbrak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 07:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21471964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShowMeAHero/pseuds/ShowMeAHero
Summary: “What the hell, Eds?” Richie demands. Eddie frowns at him.“What do you mean?” Eddie asks. “It’s just a fucking picture of me and my dad, asshole. What are you talking about?”“Why was I not informed sooner that you’vealwayshad curly hair?” Richie clarifies. “Where the fuck was this when we were kids?”
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: as the ghost begins to bleed [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1493912
Comments: 48
Kudos: 417





	all my charms and all my accidents

**Author's Note:**

> another lovechild between me and lauryn, this time kind of literally
> 
> eta: enjoy [this fun title card](https://twitter.com/princesDameron/status/1208424537060233219) that bucky made for this part also
> 
> Title taken from ["Witch"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBZ8msp857A) by The Bird and the Bee.

The longer Eddie goes without cutting his hair, the curlier it gets, until it’s driving Richie to literal distraction. He can’t stop running his hands through it every chance he gets, usually to Eddie’s false chagrin and blushing face. He slaps him away, except when Richie follows him into the shower and washes his hair for him. Then, he lets him touch as much as he wants, so Richie  _ does,  _ runs his hands through his hair and over his shoulders and down the cut of his hips.

Eddie makes him get out of the shower when it becomes clear he’s going to be more distracting than washing, so Richie just dries himself off and starts digging through their old shit for scrapbooks and photo albums. He gets stuck there, flipping backwards through old photo albums of theirs when he realizes that Eddie had the fucking hair  _ when he was a baby. _

He drags the albums out to the living room and makes Eddie come with him, dressed but hair still dripping wet. He shoves the albums into his hands, pointing aggressively at a picture of Eddie when he was about Riley’s age, sitting in his dad’s lap. Eddie’s got a mess of curls on top of his head and the same big doe eyes he’s always had, and his dad looks a fuckload like him.

“What the hell, Eds?” Richie demands. Eddie frowns at him.

“What do you mean?” Eddie asks. “It’s just a fucking picture of me and my dad, asshole. What are you talking about?”

“Why was I not informed sooner that you’ve  _ always  _ had curly hair?” Richie clarifies. “Where the fuck was this when we were kids?”

“Fuck,” Riley repeats. Eddie shoots Richie a glare that could’ve killed him, if he’d been paying attention.

“My mom hot combed it,” Eddie says. Richie frowns, flipping through the albums again until he finds a picture of the two of them, about three years old, sprawled out in front of the television set together. They’ve both got so much curly hair between them, and their heads are bowed so close, it’s almost impossible to tell where one of them begins and the other ends.

“Why’d she do that?” Richie asks. Eddie flips back to the picture of him and his dad.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Eddie says. “Why the hell would my mom have such a weird reaction to me looking like my father, Richie?”

“Point taken.” Richie flips through the pictures again. “I think you should let it stay curly.”

“Why? It’s impossible to manage like this,” Eddie says. Richie looks up at him just in time to see a drip of water fall from his hair onto his face, and Eddie’s nose scrunching up as it did.

“Because you’re so  _ cute,”  _ Richie says, pained.  _ “Damn  _ you.”

“I’m in my forties,” Eddie grumbles, but he lets Richie kiss him anyways, cupping his face in his hands and pushing their noses together for a moment before kissing him properly.

“Daddy,” Riley comments. Richie pulls away.

“She means you,” Richie says.

“You have literally no way of knowing—” Eddie starts to say, but when they actually look down at her, she’s reaching for Eddie. “Lucky fucking guess.”

“Or I’m a witch.” Richie climbs off of Eddie and scoops Audrey up off the ground instead. “You wouldn’t tell either of them their hair wasn’t cute, would you?”

“First of all, they’re children under the age of two,” Eddie snaps, lifting Riley up into his lap. He seems to hesitate for a second before he takes a curl of her hair between his fingers, rubbing it softly. “Second of all. It  _ is  _ cute.”

“So’s yours,” Richie tells him. “You were a cute baby, Eddie.”

“Shut up.”

Richie leans over the back of the sofa, noses into Eddie’s throat. “You’re  _ still  _ a cute baby, Eddie.”

“I said  _ shut up,”  _ Eddie repeats desperately. Richie kisses his neck and pulls away. Eddie’s attention drifts away again, back to Riley’s hair between his fingers. He strokes it through a couple of times before he says, “I don’t know. I haven’t let my hair just… I don’t know. I haven’t left it alone in a long time.”

Richie ruffles his hair, shaking water out of it and making Riley laugh up at him. She reaches up to yank on Eddie’s hair, too.

“Daddy!” she exclaims, and Eddie shakes his head in her face. She shrieks with laughter.

“You have the same hair, Riley, look,” Richie says. He ruffles Riley’s hair, too, and she grabs at his hand.

“Same hair!” Riley exclaims. She pushes her face up into Eddie’s, trying to reach his hair again. Eddie sighs against her cheek as she scales him.

“Thanks, Rich,” Eddie says dryly. Richie leaves them there, Riley still trying to climb onto Eddie’s head, because Audrey’s starting to make frustrated noises at him and he’s pretty sure she’s just tired. There aren’t a lot of books in their bedroom right now, but that’s where Audrey’s bassinet is.

“Alright, let’s see what we’ve got here,” he says, sitting cross-legged on the bed and sorting through the few books they keep next to the bed. “None of these are great storybooks… Well,” he says, lifting up the book Ben had given him,  _ The Black Arts,  _ “this just comes up with whatever I wanna read, so.”

Audrey just watches him with her big eyes, so he sits up against the headboard with her arranged on his chest, her head on his shoulder, and opens the book with one hand. He keeps his other hand over her back in case she slides.

“Let’s see,” he says. The words melt onto the page, just like they had when Ben had first presented him with the book. It says  _ The Black Arts,  _ like it should, but underneath it says “Elixir of Life,” which it has never said before. “Alright, this says… ‘Elixir of Life.’”

Audrey doesn’t answer, because she’s incapable of language, so he just keeps skimming the pages. They form under his eyes, and he reads out loud to her for a while before he realizes what he’s actually reading. It’s a ritual, a lot like the necromancy rites he’d done to bring Eddie and Stan back, but it’s fresher. The pages start to smell like grass.

“Can you smell that?” Richie asks softly. Audrey’s already falling asleep. “Alright, yeah, cool. Scratch and sniff. Normal book stuff.”

He lifts Audrey up and off his chest, tucking her carefully into her bassinet. She doesn’t stir. He settles back against the headboard again, one hand steadily rocking her bassinet, the other one still flipping through the book.

He’s not even entirely sure what the ritual is. It seems to bring life to your household, and Richie’s been  _ dragging  _ himself through seasonal depression lately, so it’s tempting. The grass smell blossoms, and it’s joined by lilacs and rose bushes, then freshwater, like a spring. Richie keeps reading until he gets to a section subtitled  _ Ingredients. _

It calls for simple things. Apple seeds, ripe banana ends, fennel seeds. Rose quartz, fluorite, moonstone, aventurine. Malabar leaf, mugwort, Reunion geranium, rose otto, stinging nettle. Richie’s got most of that in the weird kit Beverly had bought for him off the internet that he keeps in the back of the closet, so he decides to see what the ritual will do.

He’s assuming it’s just going to add good vibes to the house, or something.

Maybe it’ll be like a candle and just smell really good.

He grabs his stone mortar and pestle and sets to work at his writing desk in the corner of their bedroom. The list under  _ Ingredients  _ shifts as he adds ground ingredients to his little bowl, crossing things out for him. It’s a pretty fucking impressive book, and Richie makes a mental note to thank Ben again for it the next time he sees him. The seeds go in easy, and the mashed banana pieces mix in with the oils that are suggested at the bottom of the page. The stones are harder to break, but he carefully snaps off tiny pieces and drops them in with the leaves and petals and roots.

The last ingredients are hair and blood. Specifically, hair from the root, and blood from the caster. Richie considers this, then heads for the bathroom off their bedroom. Eddie’s comb is still wet from after his shower, and he pulls a thread of his curly hair free.

“Maybe it’ll smell like Eddie’s shampoo,” Richie comments to Audrey as he passes her by. He hesitates for a moment before he puts the strand of hair in the bowl, though. He’s not entirely sure what the spell will do, but he knows that it’s starting to make his blood hum in his veins, and he’s not really entirely capable of stopping when it starts to burn like this. He drops the hair into the bowl and grabs his pin. He pricks his thumb, then sticks it in the bowl. It stings, and he hisses through his teeth, but the pain bleeds in and out seamlessly, until he feels like he’s losing too much blood into the bowl and has to retreat.

He wraps a tissue around his thumb while he continues to work, stirring the bowl with the small stick he keeps with the other witchcraft odds and ends in his closet. The bowl starts to hum, which is new. Usually they don’t make sounds, but Richie just sits back and watches the bowl glow golden, then soften into a rosier butterscotch. It vibrates, still making humming sounds.

Then, the bowl explodes.

_ “Motherfucker,”  _ Richie spits, hands flying up to protect his face. He feels it scratch his hands and his face, and he turns, jumping up and out his chair to snatch Audrey up and turn his back to the desk so nothing hits her.

Audrey shrieks at him, but it seems like she’s echoing. Richie frowns down at her, wondering if its just his ears ringing from the bowl fucking  _ exploding.  _ She’s not hurt, but she’s got Richie’s blood smeared across her face from his hands, and she’s screaming bloody murder at him. He can’t figure out why the fuck it sounds like her voice is vibrating.

“What the fuck was that?” Eddie demands, the bedroom door banging open. Richie looks up at him. “Holy shit, Richie, why are you bleeding?”

“The— I was—” Richie starts to say, but he’s still disoriented. Eddie starts coming towards him, then stops, looking down at their bed.

“Richie, what the  _ fuck  _ did you do,” Eddie chokes out. Richie spins, trying to figure out what he’s looking at, and his attention lands hard on the bloody mass on their bed. He almost screams, but the sound dies in his throat when he realizes it’s a fucking baby, and it’s screaming and crying, which is why it sounded like Audrey was fucking  _ vibrating  _ through the room.

“I don’t— I don’t know,” Richie says. “Eddie, I— I don’t know, I, I was reading in  _ The Black Arts  _ and it smelled— Eds, it smelled like grass. I don’t— It smelled like grass.”

Eddie’s just staring at him like he’s grown a second head, which is fucking fair, because Richie feels like he’s stuck in a dream that he can’t wake up from. Neither of them moves for a long,  _ long  _ moment. Then, though, Eddie spits, “Jesus fucking  _ shit,  _ Richie,” and goes to scoop the baby up off the bed. It’s tiny,  _ so  _ tiny, even in Eddie’s hands, and Eddie uses his sleeve to wipe blood off its face. He only gags once, to his credit. Richie can’t even move, paralyzed in the middle of the room, still clutching Audrey to his chest.

“What did you  _ do,”  _ Eddie whispers again. He whirls on Richie. “Richie, are you fucking  _ kidding me?  _ Whose kid is this? Did you— Did you  _ make this?  _ Did you summon it? Is it dead? Oh, God, wait—” Eddie cuts off, fingers groping for the newborn’s neck. Richie wonders vacantly if he  _ did  _ summon it or make it and, if he did, does that mean it doesn’t count as a newborn? It wasn’t born.

“Is it alive?” Richie asks. His voice sounds ragged, for some reason.

“Yes,” Eddie tells him. “She.”

“What?”

“She, it’s a she, Richie,” Eddie repeats. “Show me what you did.”

Richie walks Eddie backwards through the steps. He shows Eddie the book, but Eddie can’t read the words Richie can. He keeps saying the pages are blank, and it makes Richie so frustrated he shoves the book in the bottom drawer of his writing desk and slams it shut. He shows Eddie all the ingredients, then tries to describe what happened; by the end of it, he’s starting to work himself up into a panic, the adrenaline seeping out of his system and taking the shock with it.

“Oh, shit,” Richie says. He looks down at Audrey, and she’s stopped crying, but her face is covered in his blood. Richie gags.

“Give her to me,” Eddie demands, and Richie does, passing her over in enough time to get his hands on their trash bin and vomit into it. Eddie crouches down next to him, says, “Wash your face and come out to the living room,” and leaves Richie alone in the bedroom.

It takes him a second to process what’s even happening. His hands are shaking and he knows he’s still sluggishly dripping blood, so he drags himself into the bathroom and scrubs himself down in the sink. When he looks up at his face, he finds shallow scrapes and scratches from the shards, but not much else. His hands are cut up, but he can’t bandage them himself, so he just goes out and cleans up their bedroom as best as he can before he goes back out to the living room.

He’s not entirely sure what he’s going to find. Part of him wonders if this is a hallucination, like the ones he’d had months and months ago, after the Deadlights. Part of him wonders if it really is all a dream.

Part of him knows it’s real, and isn’t surprised at all when he finds Eddie with Riley, Audrey, and— whatever it is Richie’s made— on the living room floor.

“She’s alive,” Eddie says. Richie sits down across from him, cross-legged. Eddie passes the baby over to him, and Richie takes her without hesitation, fitting her right into his hands. She’s small, smaller than any baby Richie’s held before in his entire life, but she is clearly alive, Eddie’s right. She shifts in his hold, squirming a little on her back. Richie exhales.

“Look at her face,” Eddie tells him. Richie does. “What do you see, Richie?”

Richie looks harder, so he can come up with an answer. He skims over her skin, then her separate features. She blinks open unfocused eyes, and he suddenly understands.

“You,” Richie says. Eddie frowns, leaning over to look at her face.

“I see  _ you,”  _ Eddie tells him. “What do you mean, me?”

“Look at her eyes,” Richie says. “Eds, I’ve only seen those doe eyes once, and that was in  _ your  _ head.”

Eddie’s quiet, then gently runs his fingertips over the infant’s head. She’s got a bunch of curly black hair, and Richie  _ fully  _ understands, something clicking in the back of his chest.

“I didn’t mean to,” Richie says, once he processes what’s going on. “Eddie, I swear.”

“I believe you, you fucking dumbass,” Eddie tells him. He doesn’t sound mad, just— confused. Richie gets it; he’s baffled as fuck. “What was the ritual called?”

Richie pauses. “‘Elixir of Life.’”

Eddie sighs.

“I didn’t  _ know,”  _ Richie says. “The pages smelled like grass, Eds!”

“You keep saying that like it means you should trust the book that suddenly  _ smells like grass,”  _ Eddie says. “Richie, you created a  _ child.  _ Do you know what this means?”

Richie frowns. “I— We need a birth certificate?”

“You created  _ life,  _ Richie,” Eddie reiterates. He still sounds choked. Richie tears his eyes off the baby to look up at Eddie instead, at his creased red face, brows furrowed, concerned.

“People create life all the time,” Richie says. “That’s what Patty’s doing right now. That’s what people are supposed to do.”

“Not with fucking  _ apple seeds,”  _ Eddie hisses. Richie looks back down at the baby, at her big dark eyes that look exactly like Eddie’s. He can see what Eddie’s talking about, too, about his own features in the line of her nose, the curve of her mouth. He traces down one soft cheek with his fingertip.

“Can we keep her?” Richie asks. Eddie groans, throwing his hands up in the air and standing up off the ground.

“She’s not a  _ puppy,  _ Richie,” Eddie admonishes, heading for the kitchen. Richie cranes his neck to follow, but Eddie comes right back. “Yes, we can keep her, that’s— I didn’t even think that was a question. She’s our baby.”

Richie’s heart jumps, and he feels sick again. He fights it down, instead turning to Audrey and Riley, the latter of which is watching him silently.

“Daddy?” she asks. Richie shifts the baby to one arm and holds out the other, and Riley carefully walks over to him, tucking herself into his side. She surveys the baby with hesitance, then curiosity, leaning closer. “Baby.”

“Yeah, that’s a baby.” Richie looks up as Eddie reenters the room with Audrey’s car seat. “Where are we going?”

“You were right,” Eddie says, lifting Audrey up and into the carrier, strapping her in. “She needs a birth certificate.”

* * *

Richie sometimes marvels at Eddie’s ability to just keep fucking going.

When Eddie had died and Richie had left Derry and gone back to Los Angeles, he’d done… pretty much nothing at all. He’d sat in his house, stared at the wall, drank a lot, and cried most of the time he was awake. It wasn’t until he’d gone back to Derry and started digging through Mike’s shit that he’d found a reason to move forward, and that reason was the only one that could have possibly helped: bringing Eddie back.

Eddie, on the other hand, catches one whiff of chaos and starts reordering everything without a beat of hesitation. Mike had recounted for Richie how Eddie had crashed his car the second he’d told him who he was, and that Eddie had delightedly told him he was fine afterwards. Eddie himself had recounted for Richie how Bowers had stabbed him in the face and Eddie had just laughed it off until he got the chance to stab Bowers back. The man just has an uncanny ability to shove all the bullshit aside and just  _ keep. fucking. going. _

It’s especially helpful in moments like this, when Richie’s standing in the lobby of the Health Department at City Hall with Eddie, watching him argue with the woman behind the front desk. Richie’s got Riley in one arm and Audrey’s carrier in the other, unhelpfully watching as Eddie leans in, still holding the new baby in his arms.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Eddie says.

“You just  _ got  _ her?” the woman asks again. Her name tag says  _ Agnes,  _ and she’s not taking any shit. She’s roughly eighty years old, but could possibly be as old as nine hundred, based on the speed she’s moving. She hasn’t really been accepting any of their story, which they’d try to keep as vague as possible. Turns out, that’s not in their favor.

Richie makes a snap-second judgment. “I had an affair.”

_ “What?”  _ Eddie hisses. The clerk next to Agnes leans over, pretending she’s not listening. She’s maybe twenty years old. Richie wonders why they couldn’t have gotten  _ her. _

“You had an affair?” Agnes asks.

“Yeah,” Richie says. In for a penny, in for a pound. “I slept with a woman I met in a bar and she just found me and told me she had a baby she didn’t want and left the baby with me.”

“You slept with a woman but you’re married to a man?” Agnes asks, like that’s the biggest problem with all of this.

“Bisexual people exist, Agnes,” the other clerk says.

“And you’re okay with this, young man?” Agnes asks Eddie. Eddie glares at Richie.

“We’re working through it,” Eddie says through clenched teeth. He’s doing a great job of acting pissed. Richie’s partially sure it’s because it’s not all acting.

“We already have two kids we adopted, so, we figured adopting another one wasn’t that big of a deal,” Richie says. “Especially since she’s ours— mine. Biologically. I mean.”

Agnes continues to eyeball them.

“I’ve apologized a ton of times,” Richie adds. The look in Eddie’s eyes screams murder. “We’re going to couples’ counseling and everything.”

Agnes scrutinizes them for another moment, then looks down at the baby. She must see in her face whatever Eddie did, because she looks up at Richie again, comparing the two, then says, “Okay, fill these out and we’ll get you a temporary certificate until the official one’s done processing in ninety days. What’s her name?”

Richie freezes, realizing they hadn’t even fucking  _ considered  _ that they’d have to name her, and looks to Eddie to find him staring back with equal horror. Richie looks back to Agnes, at the name  _ Agnes  _ on her name bar, and quickly decides that’s too old. The name bar on the clerk next to her says  _ Mckinleigh,  _ which also doesn’t land for him, but the woman at the printer behind  _ her  _ has a name bar that says  _ Eleanor,  _ and that’s easily the best of the three.

“Eleanor,” he says. Eddie whips back around to Agnes.

“Eleanor,” Eddie repeats. “Give me the forms, I’ll do them, here—”

Eddie snatches up all the paperwork and takes them over to the waiting tables. Richie sets Audrey’s carrier down on the floor while Eddie tries to organize everything, leafing through the pages and filling them out with a speed Richie would be impressed by if he wasn’t still high-key freaking out.

“Where’d you get Eleanor from?” Eddie asks.

“Name tag on the girl at the printer,” Richie answers. Eddie hums.

“It’s nice,” Eddie says. “She needs a middle name, too, though.”

“Well, you can pick,” Richie says, readjusting Riley on his lap. She drops her head on his shoulder and watches the baby— well, Eleanor, Richie supposes— in Eddie’s hands as he works. “I chose Eleanor, technically.”

Eddie looks her over, then says, “What about Rachel?”

“Richie and Rachel?” Richie asks, and Eddie’s face flushes a little. “Aha.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snaps. He scribbles her name down and keeps filling the forms out. Richie pulls out his phone and takes a picture of Eleanor sleeping in Eddie’s grip while Eddie works, then shows it to him.

“Should I send it?” Richie asks. Eddie hesitates, then nods.

“Fine, but let me finish first,” he says, and so Richie does. They fill out the forms together while Riley slowly gets more and more comfortable with Eleanor, even if she can’t pull off saying her name and keeps calling her “Nora.”

Eddie doesn’t even actually let him send the picture until they’re all the way back home, when Richie’s sitting in his armchair with Audrey in his lap and Nora in his arms, and Eddie’s carefully braiding Riley’s hair.

“Okay, go ahead,” Eddie says, tying off Riley’s braid. “They’re all going to call immediately, you know.”

“I know,” Richie tells him. He sends the picture to the Losers group chat.

**guess what i fucked up today**

**[picture file]**

**this is Eleanor Rachel Kaspbrak**

** _[missed call from Bev]_ **

** _[missed call from Bev]_ **

** _[missed call from Bev]_ **

** _Bev: _ ** _ richie pick up the damn phone _

** _Bill: _ ** _ What the fuck?? _

** _[missed call from Bill]_ **

“Stop tormenting them,” Eddie says, watching his phone buzz. Riley clambers up into his lap once her hair’s finished and peers at his phone screen as he scrolls. “Just answer the fucking phone.”

“But isn’t this funny?” Richie asks. He snaps a picture of Nora and Audrey next to each other and sends it.

**[picture file]**

**2 peas in a pod!**

** _Bev: _ ** _ answer your motherfucking phone richie _

** _Mike: _ ** _ whose kid is this? _

** _Stan: _ ** _ If you don’t answer your phone when I call, I’ll kill you _

Richie’s phone starts to buzz. He looks up at Eddie, who waves him off, so Richie picks up the phone. Stan’s not one for empty threats. “Hello?”

“Explain,” Stan says, as Bev picks up the group call at the same time. Richie turns his camera on, and everyone clicks in quickly. Ben and Bev are crammed into Bev’s camera, and Mike and Bill are both shoved into Mike’s; Stan’s by himself, still at work.

Richie explains. He walks through it step-by-step, lets his friends admonish him and heckle him and scream at him when he tells him what he’s done.

“I think we should maybe have a filter on your spells or something,” Bev suggests.

“There’s a fucking idea,” Eddie grumbles.

“What, I have to go to the council before I try any rituals?” Richie asks.

“I mean,” Stan says. “It’s not the worst idea. You’ve accidentally brought an entire town back from the dead and now you’ve created life.”

“One of those is  _ far  _ less common than the other,” Richie says, but he folds quickly. He knows they’re right, but more than that, it’s almost like the weight’s being eased. It’s isolating, dealing with this all the time, wondering if he’s doing things right or wrong because there’s literally  _ no  _ fucking person he can ask. “Is it— You guys won’t be annoyed? If I ask about stuff?”

“Why the fuck would we be annoyed?” Stan asks. “Richie, you realize how insane this all is, right? We want to help you.”

“You’re not alone in this, Richie,” Bev tells him, so warmly Richie wants to cry a little bit. He looks away from his phone screen to gather himself, but all he does is make direct eye contact with Eddie, who’s looking at him with a furrowed brow.

“You’re not alone in this,” Eddie echoes Bev. “Rich, you’ve  _ never  _ been alone in this. No matter— I mean, no matter what happens, Rich, I’m here for you. Always.”

“Aw,” Bill coos through the phone.

“Shut the fuck up, Bill,” Eddie snaps, before looking back to Richie. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that, you dipshit. You don’t have to do things alone. You  _ never  _ have to do things alone.”

“You’re gonna regret that when I won’t even go to the grocery store by myself,” Richie says, but his voice breaks and he starts crying partway through. Eddie comes to him, sits on the arm of the chair and pulls Richie’s face into his chest to calm him down.

“Want to have family dinner at your place this week?” Bev asks. It’s still Thursday, but Richie nods. “Okay, honey. We’ll see you on Sunday, okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says.

“Send us more pictures!” Bill exclaims.

“Spend some time with them,” Mike adds. Richie wipes at his face.

“I love you guys,” Ben says, so warmly and so genuinely that Richie has to laugh.

“I’ll see you guys on Sunday,” Eddie says over Richie’s shoulder before leaning in to hang up. He takes the phone from Richie’s grasp. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Richie replies. “What’s up?”

“You don’t have to keep any of this secret,” Eddie says. Richie hesitates, then looks up at him. He can hear Pennywise’s voice ringing faintly in his ears through memory, can hear the murky taunts of  _ I know your secret, your dirty little secret. _

“I’m sorry,” Richie tells him. “I just— I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Richie,  _ nobody  _ knows what they’re doing,” Eddie reminds him. “That’s why we have each other, you fucking dipshit. You think people get married because they want to? No, it’s because they have to, it’s evolution—”

“You suck,” Richie says, but he’s grinning.

“We’re a team,” Eddie says. “No matter what it is, okay? Do I need to fucking remind you that you might be a necromancer, but  _ I’m  _ the fucking zombie you brought back? I get it, Richie. You don’t need to hide it.”

Richie’s got tears streaming down his face by the end of it, but he manages to say, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Eddie pulls his face in again, repeats, “Don’t be sorry,” and Richie takes a deep breath to calm himself down.

“Are you mad?” Richie asks. He’s a little embarrassed about how childish the question sounds, when he’s forty years old and a father of two— No, well, father of three, now. Still, he asks it, because it’s been bumping around his head since the whole mess began.

“Mad?” Eddie echoes. “Am I  _ mad?” _

“It’s a fair question,” Richie says. Eddie doesn’t speak for a moment.

“No, I’m not mad,” he eventually answers. “I’m not mad. I’m— I think I’m still kind of in shock.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Eddie makes an acknowledging sound. “Does your face still hurt?”

“Why, ‘cause it’s killing you?” Richie asks, half-laughing.

“No, you fucking  _ clown,  _ because you blew up a bowl with magic into your own face,” Eddie snaps at him, ruffling Richie’s hair and kissing him on the crown of his head. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah?”

“And,” Eddie says, “I’m— Okay, I’m kind of excited.”

Richie tips his head back to look up at him. “Excited?”

“She looks a lot like you,” Eddie points out. “I— I don’t know. I kind of hoped we’d have more kids someday. I fucking wish you’d given me more time to prepare, or— literally, I wish you’d known what you were  _ doing  _ when you fucking did this, but. Well, it’s done, and we get another kid out of it, and I’m— I’m really happy with you, Richie. I am. I don’t want you to think I’m not. You know how much I love you, right?”

Richie laughs a wet laugh. “Stop, you’re going to make my heart explode.”

“I’m serious.”

“Me, too,” Richie says. He pulls Eddie down to kiss him. “I love you, too. I’m sorry I fucked up.”

“What else is new?” Eddie murmurs against his lips. “You bring me to life on accident, it’s only fair you bring actual life to life on accident.”

“Baby, you  _ are  _ my life,” Richie says, and Eddie kisses him again. Audrey fusses at them, yanks at Richie’s hair for his attention, and Richie’s jarred again when he looks down to see Nora again. She’s sleeping, which the websites Richie’s been Googling rapidly on his phone say is normal for newborns, and he gets what Eddie’s saying.

“Just don’t do it again,” Eddie hurries to say. Richie laughs again.

“No more rituals without you, Eds,” Richie tells him. Eddie kisses him on the cheek, then grimaces. “What?”

“I should clean up your face and your hands,” Eddie says. “Actually, I should probably bandage a couple of these, if you’re going to be a dipshit, sticking your hand in literally any fucking concotion a book tells you to make—”

“And  _ there’s  _ my husband,” Richie says, laughing when Eddie smacks him on the shoulder and hops up to go retrieve the first aid kit from the closet. Riley eyes him from the sofa, so Richie beckons to her. She shimmies down and clambers up into Richie’s lap, squeezing herself in between the arm of the chair and his side. Richie kisses the top of her head.

“Look at that,” he says to her, “my three favorite people.”

“Fuck you, too,” Eddie says, coming back to kneel in front of Richie.

“And there’s fourth place,” Richie continues. Eddie flicks him in the kneecap and leans up to kiss him before he dabs alcohol on the scratches on his face and Richie cusses him out.

**Author's Note:**

> You can (and should!) talk to me on Twitter at [@nicolelianesolo](https://twitter.com/nicoIodeon)!


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